She was born in Brussels to an English insurance man with Nazi sympathies and an aristocratic Dutch mother and spent the war years with her mother in German-occupied Holland, near to starvation and witnessing terrible atrocities. Studying ballet and drama in postwar Britain (where she'd spent several prewar years at school), she had brief roles in the West End and in British movies, before a sudden leap into fame in Gigi on Broadway in 1951 (Colette had spotted her shooting a French film in Paris) and then as the fugitive princess in William Wyler's Roman Holiday (1953).

Her star quality and sheer lovability were immediately recognised. She was put on the cover of Time, won an Oscar, attracted the terms ("coltish", "gamine", "elfin") that would be attached to her thereafter and became the chosen representative of Givenchy chic.

Was it her spontaneous reaction to that moment when Roman Holiday co-star Gregory Peck (who insisted when he saw the final cut that she share above-title billing) tricks her into thinking he's being bitten by the gargoyle that everyone took her to their hearts?

She got to sing Moon River in Breakfast at Tiffany's, but her numbers were dubbed as Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, where Rex Harrison virtually spoke his lyrics. Her real acting during that peak period was as the Belgian girl working through her vocation in Fred Zinnemann's The Nun's Story (1959) and she was superb. And in 1967 she at last got to make a serious movie with someone her own age, performing beautifully with Albert Finney as a couple ruefully revisiting their earlier lives while driving across France in Two for the Road, directed by Stanley Donen from an artfully contrived script by Frederic Raphael.

Always uncertain about her beauty and her talent, she retreated into private life after her second marriage in 1969 to an Italian psychiatrist. When that broke down, she lived in Switzerland, largely devoting herself to philanthropic works, especially as a goodwill ambassador for Unicef, an activity stemming from her traumatic wartime experience. Only rarely did she re-emerge in the cinema, most significantly in 1976 in the elegiac Robin and Marian, playing the ageing Maid Marian reunited with Sean Connery's grizzled Robin Hood. But just before her death from cancer, she played a small, decisive role as the angel greeting aviator Richard Dreyfus on his arrival in heaven in Spielberg's Always, a scene that made the prospect of death that much more bearable for men the world over.

Her mythology One of her little black dresses from Breakfast at Tiffany's was auctioned at Christie's for £467,200, the proceeds going to clothe African children.

New York Times obituary "Thanks to their first glimpse of Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday, half a generation of young females stopped stuffing their bras and teetering on high heels."

Hepburn on herself "Look, whenever I read or hear I'm beautiful, I simply don't understand it. I'm certainly not beautiful in any conventional way. I didn't make my career on beauty."

Billy Wilder "Audrey was known for something that has disappeared and that is elegance, grace and manners. God kissed her on the cheek and there she was."